david k warfel
Thanks for your patience as I have been slower than usual to post in August! An intense week-long training event followed by a family vacation has taken me offline for a large part of the month, and it feels good to be back here again. I get a little uncomfortable around mistakes, especially my own.... Continue Reading →
July seems like the perfect month to write a blog post about landscape lighting in a back yard. Our days are long and our evenings warm in Wisconsin right now, and we enjoy relaxing outdoors as long as the mosquitoes will let us. A little well-planned light will extend our evenings a bit longer as... Continue Reading →
Light for our bodies can help us feel better, and this may be the most important promise of them all. Throughout human history, discovery and invention have joined together to deliver turning points of epic proportions, moments at which all of humanity advanced into new eras. We discovered countless galaxies and nebulae and expanded our... Continue Reading →
A guest appearance on a podcast is always a bit unknown. Will the host ask questions that I struggle to answer? Will the conversation flow in strange directions? Will I enjoy it or be counting the minutes until it is over? All my fears were allayed on this recent episode of Fine Homebuilding ProTalk Podcast... Continue Reading →
My journey towards the light was not always easy or straight, and a chaotic turning point grew increasingly likely as I pushed towards my fortieth birthday. I spent the entirety of my 30’s (and change) split between the worlds of university teaching and freelance designing, periodically shifting the balance from one to the other as... Continue Reading →
The final article in my series for Designing Lighting is out, and it is bittersweet to have wrapped up a year of writing for this industry publication. I'm excited for the next challenge (stay tuned, I have another series or two beginning in other publications soon), and grateful for the space and opportunity to write... Continue Reading →
Tonight we are going to a nearby restaurant for the first time, a local Italian spot with a reputation for meatballs. We will be evaluating the food to be certain, but also evaluating the atmosphere. Is it a place we would enjoy again? Would we bring friends or out-of-town family here? Our decision will likely... Continue Reading →
This post is a continuation of my Don't/Do This: Primary Bedroom exploration. My Don't/Do This series are a lot of fun to sketch and imagine. Too much fun, perhaps, as the post on primary bedrooms has now ballooned into three. Without much forethought, I find myself creating an increasingly comprehensive series aimed at comparing and... Continue Reading →
If light itself is a gift, what kind of gift is it? Is it a new pair of socks, useful but not particularly exciting, or new electronics that are exciting now but will be obsolete in a few short years? Is light something handmade with love, with no monetary value but nonetheless priceless? Light, which... Continue Reading →
Light became a tool when I landed my first job in architectural lighting following graduate school, but my journey did not continue on a tidy linear path. I learned quite a bit from my employers and coworkers and enjoyed the excitement of working on high-profile projects in downtown Chicago and beyond. Unfortunately, I was also young and... Continue Reading →
the language of light 